Voting for Vichy: Careers of French Legislators, 1940‐1958 Amanda
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Voting for Vichy: Careers of French Legislators, 1940‐1958 Amanda Russell Senior Honors Thesis Dr. Lynch April 15, 2012 1 Introduction On July 10, 1940, in the humiliating aftermath of a triumphant German invasion, 570 members of the French National Assembly voted extraordinary powers to the Prime Minister, Philippe Pétain (see Table 1). 1 Although Pétain had been in office less than a month, he enjoyed such universal admiration and esteem that his rapid ascension to power gave hope to the shell‐shocked citizens of the Third Republic.2 For a generation of men who had fought in the trenches of World War I, no man could have been more suitable or worthy of command than Pétain, hero of the Battle of Verdun and one of only two living Marshals of France.3 Already eighty‐four years old in 1940, Pétain’s life of dutiful service had marked him with a reputation of being just, fair, and, above all, devoted to the French nation.4 Who could be more trusted to use virtually unlimited power for reconstruction and renewal than Pétain, a man known even to his opponents as a veritable “[incarnation] […] [of] traditional French virtues”?5 1 Jean Joly, Dictionnaire des parlementaires français: notices biographiques sur les parlementaires français de 1889 à 1940 (Paris, 1960) and Dictionnaire des parlementaires français: notices biographiques sur les parlementaires français de 1940 à 1958 (Paris: La documentation française, 1988), http://www.assemblee‐ nationale.fr/histoire/cr_10‐juillet‐1940.asp; Olivier Wieviorka, Orphans of the Republic: The Nation’s Legislators in Vichy France, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 345‐358, 365. 2 Wieviorka, Orphans of the Republic, 39. 3 Ibid, 40. 4 Robert Paxton, Vichy France 1940‐1944 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 31. 5 Vincent Badie, “Vive la République: Motion opposée au projet du loi du 10 juillet 1940,” Digithèque de matériaux juridiques et politiques, Université de Perpignan, last modified 1998, www.mjp.univ.perp.fr/france/badie.htm. 2 Yet rather than proving to be Cincinnatus reborn, Pétain presided over four of the most authoritarian and morally abject years in French history, marred from the start by a staunch defeatism that led to outright collaboration with Nazi Germany. While Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Poland all met strategic defeat in 1939 and 1940 with resolute determination of their leaders to continue fighting, Pétain’s France capitulated completely. As one of the greatest military and colonial powers in the world, France was in a comparatively strong position to regroup and continue its campaign against Nazi Germany, but Pétain and his ministers saw the die as cast. 6 Believing that Britain would soon fall with or without France’s help, Pétain sought to obtain peace through collaboration, hoping ultimately to gain a place at the table in the new continental order.7 Instead of the promised peace, France witnessed its own government participate in or tacitly condone a stream of transgressions against the French people. Over the four years of the German occupation, Pétain and his government repeatedly made allowances for grave betrayals of the public trust on the premise that it served the public good. A stream of daily indignities, from inadequate ration cards to German army commandeering of civilian housing, affected every single 6 Paxton, Vichy France 1940‐1944, 9; Philippe Burrin, France under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise (New York: New Press, 1996), 98. 7 Paxton, Vichy France, 10; Philippe Pétain, “Pétain fait l’annonce de la collaboration, 30 octobre 1940,” Sources de la France du XXème siècle, edited by Pierre Milza (Paris: Larousse, 1997), 210‐212; Burrin, France under the Germans, 13‐14, 66. 3 French person.8 Torture, arrests, political and racial deportations became realities for those whom the regime could not or would not protect. An estimated 22,000 Frenchmen marched into battle under the enemy’s flags on the Eastern Front, first in the officially sanctioned Legion of French Volunteers against Bolshevism, and later, directly in the Charlemagne Division of the Waffen‐SS.9 And within France itself, the Milice, a government‐authorized paramilitary force, used detention, torture, and murder against resistants and other opponents of the regime to terrorize civilians and warn them of the dire consequences of dissent.10 Yet, instead of taking action to protect the French people, Pétain and his government became obsessed with protecting a diminishing supply of legitimacy and authority, valuing the continued life of the state over the safety of the nation.11 Following the liberation of France in 1944, France’s new political leadership, made up almost entirely of men who had operated within some part of the Resistance, saw the July 1940 vote empowering Pétain as a clear, serious betrayal of the nation and its interests. 12 So the argument went, as elected representatives in a republic, France’s legislators had had a duty to the French people that went beyond legal obligations and into the realm of moral imperative. Representatives were not merely the directors of France’s administrative affairs; they existed to protect, 8 Burrin, France under the Germans, 21; Evans, The Third Reich at War, 341; Robert Gildea, Marianne in Chains: Daily Life in the Heart of France during the German Occupation (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004), 44‐45. 9 Burrin, France under the Germans, 433, 435‐436, 438; Paxton, Vichy France, 254. 10 Burrin, France under the Germans, 439, 444‐446; Richard Evans, The Third Reich at War (New York: Penguin, 2009), 398. 11 Burrin, France under the Germans, 466. 12 Wieviorka, Orphans of the Republic, 284. 4 defend, and speak on behalf of their constituents. For many members of the Resistance, as for de Gaulle, “[the legislators’] abdication on July 10, 1940, was seen as merely the latest and final instance of their unworthiness and irresponsibility.”13 Having granted unrestrained power to Pétain on the basis of what seemed to be nostalgia and hero worship, their inadequacy was all too obvious.14 In order to rebuild, France needed a clean slate, free from compromised figures who had proven their incompetence, and so these legislators had to go—and almost all of them did, at rates far exceeding those of any other grand corps.15 Whether officially purged via postwar legislation and party discipline or unofficially excluded by a hostile voting public, fewer than 10% of the men who voted to grant Pétain extraordinary powers served in an official legislative capacity between 1945 and 1958 (see Table 9).16 In this paper, I follow the 570 men of the French National Assembly who voted for Pétain from the July 10, 1940 session through the hostile political climate of the provisional government (1945‐1946) and the Fourth Republic (1946‐1958) in order to understand why these men in particular were deemed responsible for France’s painful experience during World War II. Given that 90% of lawmakers rejected collaborationism wholeheartedly and that two‐thirds or more “adopted an attitude oscillating between reserve and hostility” towards Vichy after the first two 13 Peter Novick, The Resistance versus Vichy: The Purge of Collaborators in Liberated France (London: Chatto & Windus, 1968), 95. 14 Wieviorka, Orphans of the Republic, 284. 15 Paxton, Vichy France, 346; Wieviorka, Orphans of the Republic, 284; Novick, The Resistance versus Vichy, 94‐95. 16 Wieviorka, Orphans of the Republic, 286‐292, 306‐314, 316‐318; Paxton, Vichy France, 346; Joly Dictionnaire de 1889 à 1940 and Dictionnaire de 1940 à 1958. 5 years of its existence, why were legislators who voted for Pétain in 1940 punished at exponentially higher rates than bureaucrats who carried out Vichy’s orders through 1944?17 How did voting for Pétain change in the eyes of the French people from being a vote to save France to a vote that destroyed it? In Part One, beginning with the shocking German invasion of France and the Low Countries on May 10, 1940, I flesh out the political, moral, and practical dilemmas facing France’s legislators at that juncture and explain why, as historian Olivier Wieviorka proposes, the vote for Pétain was an act of “abdication,” “adherence,” and “ambivalence.”18 In analyzing a breakdown of the vote, I suggest that although the men who voted “yes” included members from all parts of the legislature, particular types of men, on the basis of position, age, political party, and region, were more or less likely to adhere to the proposal for specific, targeted reasons. In Part Two, I explain how Pétain’s original policy of accommodation evolved into an insidious collaborationism that transformed the republic into a Nazi puppet state. Finally, in Part Three, I turn to the aftermath of the Liberation in 1944 and explore why, in the years 1945 to 1946, members of the “Gaullist” provisional government favored a near‐complete exclusion of these legislators as a means to cleanse a troubled system and mollify an angry public. Here I present the many 17 Wieviorka, Orphans of the Republic, 264‐265; Paxton, Vichy France, 346. 18 Wieviorka, Orphans of the Republic, 331‐333. 6 ways that excluded these legislators from national political life—through the high court, juries of honor, prefects, political parties, and even by the public itself. In the end, I clarify why only 56 of 570 men who had voted for Vichy ever served in national political office in the postwar years from 1945 to 1958 and how in particular temporary ineligibility for local elections effectively developed into de facto exclusion from national political life. Part One Invasion The German invasion of France and the Low Countries began on May 10, 1940; by June 10, Paris was an “open city,” and by July 10, the Third Republic was dead.